Drill of the Week: High Rep Clearing

Introduction

We are happy to finish our template for the drill of the week series and publish our first drill of the week. You can print it out on an A4 page and bring it with you to practice. If you feel that more or different information is needed to run the drill properly, please comment on the post or write a message to jan.miofsky[at]gmail.com.

Drill of the week – Template (A PDF Version of this drill of the week can be found at the end of this post.)

Our first drill in this series is a clearing drill we developed for our team this season.

Clearing

For young teams it is hard to find the right balance on how much time to spend in practice on clearing. It is often an area that is overlooked, because it will work well until you play a team on your level or better that is actually riding aggressively. That is when younger teams often struggle badly with clearing and rarely get the ball into the offensive half. (I am pretty sure that the team which played against us a few weeks ago will agree here.)

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Your Team Captains

We are back…

After a busy summer with the World Championships in Denver, taking some rest from lacrosse, settling back in at work, we are back with the blog. Our next article is about the team captains. We are also actually in the situation of figuring out the captains for Stuttgart Lacrosse.

Afterwards we will start with our drill of the week series to provide a more constant flow of content on this blog.

Why do you need captains? Why are captains so important for a player-coach?

One of the first steps you should consider is to find your captains. This is a crucial part for you, because it is the first step to spread the workload on different shoulders. As mentioned in our blog post about Running practices as a player-coach the critical thing about being a player-coach is that you can only do 2-3 things at once. Before assigning captains you need to know what you expect from your captains. Some see them as a communication channel between the team and the coach, but since you are part of the team this is not their priority task. Their tasks are more in the reign of motivation, team spirit, leading by example and warm-ups. All these things have a huge impact on the team as we will discuss later, therefore you need to think carefully who can live up to and will want this responsibility.

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Running practices as a player-coach – first steps

Practice organization

When leading practices as a player-coach it is easy to say: “Don’t use a stick, use a whistle and clipboard all the time.” But you are still a player, you get better from having your stick in your hand. You are also part of the team and that includes fooling around with your teammates. This can undermine your authority and make your coaching job harder. But your biggest problem by far is that you need to practice with the team as well and get your repetitions in. Being a player-coach as the word already indicates, combines two challenging tasks, so there has to be a trade-off. Your goal as a player-coach is to find the sweet spot between helping your team to get better and improving yourself. You want to make the most of this trade-off.

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